The birth of naturalism

The birth of naturalism

Peter Harrison

The modern era is often seen as the triumph of science over supernaturalism. But what really happened is far more interesting

...This supernaturalistic understanding of laws of nature persisted until well into the 19th century. Leading scientific figures defended its theological basis. The philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote in 1843 that ‘men of science’ understood laws of nature to be ‘the expression of the will of a superior; the superior, in this instance, being the Ruler of the universe.’ Leading scientists of the day – John Herschel, Michael Faraday, William Whewell, James Clerk Maxwell, Lord Kelvin, William Benjamin Carpenter – made explicit statements to the effect that laws of nature were divine volitions. However, this theistic conception of the natural order proved susceptible to a hostile takeover. In the latest stage in the evolution of the historical semantics of the supernatural, Huxley, who as we’ve already seen coined the term ‘scientific naturalism’, appropriated the explanatory power of laws of nature, including their immutability and universality, but jettisoned their original theological foundation. Laws of nature thus changed from laws imposed on nature by God, to what they are now: brute facts that we take to be simply intrinsic to nature.

In one of the great ironies of the history of ideas, a notion that had originally been understood as constituting irrefutable evidence of God’s ongoing activity in nature was now posited as evidence for the exact opposite, for its impossibility. In a sense, modern naturalists are in agreement with their theistic early modern counterparts in holding that there is only one world and that there is no distinct supernatural realm. But they adopt completely opposed stances on the theological implications of this position. Newton would have been able to fully endorse Caroll’s insistence that ‘there is only one world, the natural world, exhibiting patterns we call the “laws of nature”, and which is discoverable by the methods of science and empirical investigation’ and, further, would have agreed that ‘there is no separate realm of the supernatural, spiritual, or divine’ (emphasis added). But this was because he did not subscribe to a natural/supernatural distinction. Newton’s overall framing of the natural order, and indeed his justification for believing in laws of nature, was thoroughly supernaturalistic. For this reason, unlike his modern counterparts, he explicitly held ‘discourse of God’ to be integral to the scientific endeavour.

The 19th-century reversal of the theological valence of laws of nature was a remarkable accomplishment. A good part of what made it possible was a retelling of the history of science in a way that concealed the contributions of theological considerations and realigned scientific innovation with an imagined perennial naturalism. Revealing the actual history gives the lie to the presumption that the modern naturalistic approach is vindicated by the success of the sciences. If the working assumptions of such figures as Kepler, Boyle and Newton are anything to go by, the opposite is the case. The re-recasting project of the 19th-century naturalists disguised the theological origins of the idea of laws of nature. However, they found it necessary to retain core aspects of the original explanatory structure, even while denying the supernaturalistic premises that had originally rendered it coherent...

Interestingly the vast majority of data supporting intelligent design comes from mainstream science.

The birth of naturalism

Peter Harrison

I agree completely with Harrison on this. He may have mentioned it elsewhere, but I would add that Darwin's theory of evolution delivered the coupe de grace of deistic science by purporting to convincingly explain the evolution of life.